


Return Again

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Burials, Burials Era, F/M, Hollywood, M/M, Sad sad sad, Song writing, non-graphic het, serious angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 17:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey and Jade stuck on rewind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Return Again

**Author's Note:**

> I keep meaning to upload all my loads and loads of AFI fic onto this website, but it's hard. It's tim consuming. Instead I'll just post the newer stuff I've been writing, because maybe people on here also want to read Burials era fic. I don't know. This never happened, I don't own them.

From the front window, Jade can see the Hollywood sign when the visibility is better. But the air is too hazy to make anything out now, the hills or the horizon or the silhouette of bodies standing beneath hulking white letters with their cameras out like it is a thing worth documenting. 

Hollywood burns down annually, and everything is in flame now. Jade’s car is dusted with grey ash every morning, cinders falling like snow, and his lungs scorch to breathe what’s outside.

And it helps that a real thing is keeping him indoors, in this charnel house with the windows covered and the lights down low with this person whom he will never stop running from. He doesn’t think he has the capability to construct a brilliant enough lie to convince himself he’s here for any honorable reason without the fires raging outside. 

Davey’s lying on his back between the couch and the coffee table, eyes closed. Jade studies him on accident, eyes tracing the steep, shadowed vacancies made in the sunken hollows of his cheeks. He would seem old and frail and unrecognizable to Jade’s younger self, who would weep to know this was Davey, with his visible skull and naked eyes. Who wouldn’t believe it. But in his current incarnation, Jade knows it’s Davey easily, viscerally. He knows, and he doesn’t feel anything.

It’s a terrible place. Poor acoustics and worse lighting, shag carpeting some indecipherable 70’s browngreen color. The closet doors are mirrored, making the bedroom seem like something big enough to breathe in, an illusion to save them both from suffocation. It smells like their candles and their solitude, and Jade doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Why he’s here strumming his guitar while Davey hums along wordlessly, pale hand raised like a flag above him as he traces waves in the air. 

_Because you have to_ is what his heart answers to every plea, even though he doesn’t know what that means anymore. If he has to because it’s all Davey has and he can’t live with himself if he takes away that last wishbone shining in the whole decayed carcass of what they were, of if he has to because it’s something innate and unchangeable, like salmon flicking their silver bodies upstream to spawn or die trying. 

Jade feels unreal here in this house tucked away between the burning hills, sucking in ash while his real life, the life he built to save him from this, continues on like a clock wound tight and ticking just west of them. 

Words come out of Davey occasionally, broken and confused, things like _poison_ and _down_ , words that he’s used before, distinct shapes amid a sea of writhing shadows and sounds and murmurings and melodies. 

They’ve been at it for hours, and art is pouring from them like blood from a jugular wound, thick and simple like it was the thing they were built to do together. Sometimes Jade wishes he had known it was the only thing they were built to do together, that he hadn’t confused their preternatural artistic compatibility for love, for sex, for salvation. Other times he just wishes he’d never met Davey, because he knows there was no way to escape what he thought this was. Or what it once was, before their humanity bled into it and stained the clarity black.

Davey’s voice rasps _heaven_ and Jade steels himself against it. _Because you have to_ he reminds himself. _You must_.

Jade knows every word is about him. This is how Davey packages his pain, how he distills his misery into something he can bottle and choke down. How he condenses the messiness of life into constellations so he can connect each star and there will be a picture in the sky to guide his lost ships home at night. A perfect story. An anthology. 

Jade is defenseless because when this album drops, everyone will blame its subject. They’ll condemn him. They’ll forget that he has his story, too, that he has his side, silenced on the other end of Davey’s massive, yawning wounds. That Jade’s voice wails in pain to every song too, but because he is a musician and not a writer and not a singer, no one understands the language. 

“You stopped playing,” Davey says. 

Jade’s eyes snap open, falling upon still, sad fingers resting against metal cords. He blinks a few times to see if the pain retreats to its familiar locked cage in his chest. If the image of his clock-sure life, his golden hardwood hallways and her perfect, smiling face, will smooth it all away. His chest still aches. He still feels like a mirage, the shimmering lie of water in the center of this flame-lit desert, while Davey is real. 

The Hollywood sign is invisible in this kind of haze, and Jade is almost sure that if he looked into a mirror, there would be no trace of his own reflection, either. Just this dark house, the lightless, useless candle stumps and the once-black drapes sun bleached to a dusky peach, the vacancy he would fill and this person he will never stop running from. 

“Sorry. Distracted,” he says to Davey. Then he dares to look at him, squinting like it might hurt. Pale landscape wedged between furniture, cold and undead like a breathing snowdrift. Davey’s hand has dropped to thread through the carpet, from which he pulls a clump of someone’ hair, a cough drop wrapper. Then, a live spider, one of its legs trapped between his index finger and thumb while the rest of its body writhes and withers and curls spectacularly. Davey stares at it, unmoved, then sets it on he glass tabletop where it tries to skitter away, pinwheeling because the leg he held is broken. 

“By what?” he asks, voice devoid of bitterness which still comes as a surprise to Jade, every time. 

“How erased I feel by all of this,” Jade said glumly, because he can tell this won’t turn into a fight. They’re too exhausted right now, and exhaustion makes them honest. Tears might be wrought to the surface today, but not blood. And it seems Jade only fears blood now. 

Davey doesn’t even laugh the dry, cruel laugh Jade is used to hearing whenever he tries to insinuate that he is also a victim of the mess they’ve made. That it’s not just Davey who bleeds. “Hmm.” Davey says. Not, _good_ , or _I’m sorry_. Just _hmm._ And again, Jade thinks _What am I doing here?_ like a record on repeat. 

“Do you need a break?” Davey asks after a moment, heaving himself up to sit on the edge of the couch. His eyes are horrible and red-rimmed, sick from everything they’ve been doing, from everything he is putting himself through to say this. From all the constellations he has been building into his endless arrangement of stars. 

Jade is about to set down his guitar, but then he doesn’t. He thinks of how Davey is writing about so many things, how this is the expulsion of years’ worth of rage and sadness directed at every lie he has ever been told, at every heart that’s ever grown too full to encompass him. Then, Jade thinks about how over the years, he has become a symbol for every one of these things, every one of these people. How in his own grandeur, he has become invisible. A symbol instead of a person, unseeable without Davey’s lyrics. Or at least unseeable to anyone but Davey. And this is what Davey wanted. 

Jade wishes desperately that he could be angry about this, that he could drop the guitar and refuse to give Davey the satisfaction of being the thing that defines him. 

Instead, all he can feel is how much he wants to exist. How much he needs to be beside Davey right now because Davey is the only one who knows, who understands, whom these lyrics are perfectly consummate to, who can witness Jade’s existence, his meaning. 

Jade’s meaning is more important to him than his dignity. At his core he is a survivor, which is unromantic and grossly simple, but true. Davey has fashioned their future together so that he is the only thing by which Jade can survive. And Jade loathes him for it, almost as much as he used to love him. But more than he loathes him, he wants to survive. He’ll fight for his survival no matter the cost, because he’s human. 

“No. No, let’s keep going,” Jade says through a sigh. 

Davey nods, takes a swig of from his water bottle, and stares ahead at Jade, thus becoming the only mirror in which Jade will ever have a reflection. 

\---

The skin around Davey’s eyes is swollen, darkness surrounding what is bloodshot and pink with tears and tired. He puts his face in his palms after they finish the last cut, and Jade feels like his chest has been scooped free of seeds and softness until it is nothing but a melon rind, useless, empty. He watches Davey wipe his eyes with tremulous thumbs, aching all over as if he has been struck by something. 

“Break now,” Davey murmurs. 

“Okay. Okay sure, whatever you need Dave,” Jade finds himself murmuring back, voice soft and careful in this way that makes the rest of his body feel betrayed. 

It’s humiliating, how this thing works. Like a knee jerk. Like a reflex. Jade used to believe he had power to resist Davey, to not worry about him and bend and break to his every windstorm because at least he got out. At least he left the net of darkness they inhabited years ago, before Jade found her and her incredible resilience, her steadfast devotion to him. He would flail and drown and suck lungfuls of water as Davey dragged him beneath the surface, and she would wait on the shore quietly, patiently, holding a towel and whispering _It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. I’m here and I always will be. If he is not nothing now, I will convince you that he is. Because in the end, that is what you want most. And you know that, too._

And maybe that’s all this is, all either of them are. Maybe Jade is caught between two voices, both of which are trying to convince him that the other is only an illusion. And maybe he doesn’t know which to listen to on most days, but lets himself be pulled by the tide of whichever is closest, loudest. Whichever needs him most, or whichever he needs. 

He gave up on being honorable a long time ago. 

Davey gets up and disappears into the bathroom where Jade can hear running water in the sink, bare feet shifting weight on shag carpeting. He lies down on the bed, weight creasing the macrame blanket with its faded yellow daisies and basement mildew smell. Davey’s breath from the other room is so feral and ragged he wonders if this is his cue to leave. To return to his other, cleaner life where Davey’s name is unspoken and art is something that Jade does, rather than something Jade is. 

But then Davey returns, face haggard and frame seeming elemental, bones overlaid with tight muscle and nothing unnecessary in between. Wavering on the edge of the room Jade is in, he flickers in and out of being. There is a fear present in his flesh, a disbelief which Jade is only just becoming accustomed to. He’s used to being the one who is afraid, the one Davey manipulates into a state of constant fear, but something has changed in the last few years. Davey’s faith was shaken, and now he’s afraid of everything, too.

He wraps his arms around his body and stares at Jade lying neat and careful upon one side of the bed, palms folded. “Can I lie down? Will you let me?” he asks of him. 

Jade knows the right answer to this question is _No. You know I can’t do that. I’m just on my way out, gonna run some stuff through the computer. But I’ll be back tomorrow and we’ll work on it. You can hear what I’ve done and tell me what you think_. It’s safe, appropriate. Mapped out ahead of time in case this very fork in the road arises. But it doesn’t matter what preparations Jade takes. Sometimes he’ll _know_ what he should do, where he should go. What’s better for both of them. 

But he stopped caring about their wellbeing a long time ago, too. And this is a knee jerk. A reflex. 

Shaking his head, he says, “I’m not going to stop you.” His voice is so even and conversational it sounds like an abomination next to the starved, shuddering thing that is Davey’s. 

“This is so filthy,” Davey mumbles, getting down on the bed and curling up against Jade’s side like he cannot stand under the weight of his own shame. He feels like a decade of pain against Jade’s body, one huge open bleeding burn for Jade’s fingers to get mired in. Jade chokes on the air around them, and curls his palm around Davey’s shoulder, keeping him there, keeping him close. 

“Do you miss this?” Davey asks. 

“I don’t know,” Jade answers honestly, voice low and in Davey’s unwashed hair. This happens too often for it to be something he misses, and it has happened alongside too many years of regret and self-recrimination for it to be something Jade pursues with the purity of longing. It’s not something he wants, or craves, or needs anymore. It’t not something he misses. It’s not something he does, It’s something he is. Something his body is compelled to repeat over and over again, meaningless and compulsory. A forever state of rewind.

“Yeah,” Davey sighs, inhaling his breaths from Jade’s shirt until he decides that’s not quite right and gingerly pushes the fabric up around Jade’s neck so the scrape of his beard is against skin instead. “I don’t know either.” 

Their eyes adjust to the darkness together, their breath unintentionally in tandem. Jade feels along Davey’s perimeters like he designed them, familiarity so commonplace it is idle, empty. There are times when he wants to hurt Davey, cram his body down into impossibly tight places, close his hands around his throat and squeeze until his eyes glass over and his lips turn blue, only because there is a part of him still which wants to touch him in new ways. To redefine what they are together, because nothing they’ve tried has worked. 

Davey flickers and flinches beneath his hands, still scared of something. He’ll start to relax, liquify against Jade until he remembers where he is. Then his body will lock up into a live wire again, snapping them back into the context, rather than just the moment. Jade wants to kill the context, but knows he can’t because he’s the one who created it. 

_What am I doing here_ he thinks as his fingers still at Davey’s pulse, counting the steady flutter there. Then they shift, tracing his jawline, hooking inside his mouth. _What am I doing here?_ Jade pleads as he pushes inside hot, sick slickness, feeling Davey’s teeth, his tongue, the scar tissue from where he has chewed himself bloody too many times to count. Davey lets him do all this, lips slack, eyes closed, willing himself to blankness. It contrasts wildly with the way he skitters along the edges of rooms they share, orbits Jade at a distance. But here he is, paralyzed, allowing Jade to get close enough to touch places inside of him. 

Jade does not know why he is still compelled to do this. Why his hands move beyond his will, why he must keep reshaping and redrawing and resculpting Davey, why this is something he cannot stop returning to. Davey’s lips twitch around Jade’s knuckles, and it is a familiar feeling. 

Because his guts are crawling over something hot and shameful that still comes when he touches Davey, the thing he has never been able to kill, Jade withdraws. He wipes his fingers on his own shirt, and mournful eyes flicker open. “You know what this album is about?” Davey asks, quiet, rasping. 

A fist replaces the hot thing in Jade’s stomach. Angry, defensive, tight, hurt. Jade swallows, and it loosens, replaced with the familiar empty feeling of resignation. “How much you hate me?” he offers. 

Davey laughs. “No. Maybe moments of it.”

The room is so close and dark around them, it feels like they’re not on earth. Like neither of them is real, but only true and realized by one another’s presence. Breath on lips. Hands on ribs. The lips would not exist without the breath, nor the ribs without the hands. But then, the breath must be breathed by lips, and the hands must alight on something otherwise they’ll disappear. Jade recalls his not-reflection, how without Davey painting him, his image is nothing.

“It’s about death. And realizing we should have died when we had the chance to die purely,” Davey says. 

This is a very Davey thing to say, and Jade would have thought it was beautiful back when he was still taken with him. And later, much later, he would have thought it was repulsive, he would have rejected it with everything in him. 

But now he feels nothing. He’s not sure he agrees, because he’s not sure he is the type of person who believes love and death are the same anymore. He’s not sure he defines perfect love as the thing that precedes perfect death He’s not sure he even believes in perfect love, or perfect death for that matter. Jade might be the type of person who thinks that death is just rotting in the ground now, and that love is the word humans use to give meaning to the fact their bodies are chemical reactions firing over and over until they dissipate and what’s left is just the memory or what it felt like to be certain about something. 

Jade nods slowly. “You shouldn’t give up faith in your ability to die purely, Dave,” he says. But that was the wrong thing to say. Davey locks up in this way Jade immediately recognizes as irreparable. He clenches, sits up, draws away into himself. He’s backlit with the setting sun’s broken fingers creeping in through the window, orange with burning, and Jade can’t see his face, he can’t see the Hollywood sign. 

“Why? Why on earth should I have faith in anything pure anymore? You’re the one who taught me that,” Davey spits out. It sounds foreign with fear and the absence of superiority. He’s not trying to convince Jade of anything, it’s not taking his moral high ground. He is only desperate, he is only afraid. He is only alone. “Anyway, I don’t believe in faith,” he reminds Jade. 

“I’m sorry,” Jade says, and puts his face in his hands, haunted by the sounds of Davey gathering his things and preparing to leave this womb, entering into the world on fire. 

\---

Her hand is cool on Jade’s cheek, smoothing his hair from his face, tucking the loose strands behind his ears. He feels deafened here on the bed, deaf to anything save for her heartbeat. “How was it? How awful was he to you?” she asks in a voice soft with sympathy, with things she thinks she understands. 

Just as he cannot speak her name to Davey, he does not speak Davey’s name to her. They exist only as single syllable pronouns to the other, nondescript and meaningless. She tucks her fingers into the collar of his shirt, and he exhales all the stale, burnt air from the day out into their home. “I’m not sure. He’s different. It’s hard to tell.” 

She shifts under him, pulls him closer and he can tell she’s pursing her lips, although he’s not looking at her. She doesn’t want to hear that he’s different. She wants to believe he is still selfish and insane, that he still recklessly hurts Jade with a single-minded entitledness that makes him easy to hate. She wants him to be easy to hate, because then he’s something she can save Jade from, then he is a wound into which she can press salve and stitch closed. She can kiss the stitches with tender lips if Jade hates him. 

But if Davey is different, if Davey is scared and powerless, then that changes everything. It changes her power to offer a harbor away from the rage of the ocean. 

Jade is not real here. His details and subtleties get lost under her gaze, because she loves him too much. She is too perfect. And this is what Jade wants on most days, so he can sink into the simplicity of the illusion. That something other than love can save him, that all humanity is capable of is reaching out and holding onto one solid, reliable thing while love tears past, destroying cities. That whatever he had with Davey could perhaps exist in a vacuum, a test tube, but not in the real world. That she’s the real world, and he belongs there. 

This is what he wants, usually. But not today, when the visibility is bad and the ash chokes him silent. His throat aches around something unswallowable, and then, unexpectedly, he’s rubbing tears into her skirt. 

She mistakes it for something Davey wrought to the surface, and begins shhhing and cooing at Jade instantly. Giving him mouth to mouth, pushing clean air into his lungs because she thinks he wants to be saved from drowning. It’s a fair thing to think. It’s what he wants on most days, when he can’t even remember what it felt like to have his windpipe full of water and not even care he was so in love. 

Jade lets her, grips her tight and puts his fingers in her long, marmalade, kitten-soft hair. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” she murmurs when they part, breath damp on his chapped lips. “You don’t have to think about him anymore. You’re here. It’s over.” 

Shaking his head, Jade thinks _this isn’t a thing than can ever be over._ But she mistakes it for disbelief at how wonderful she is, how supportive and moving and absolving. He lets her think this because it’s easy, it’s what he wants on most days. To disappear into the illusion she has of him and his old wounds with Davey. “It’s hard,” he chokes out. “The whole thing is just so hard,” he says, meaning a million things he knows he cannot speak, knows he will never be able to explain to another living soul save for Davey, who is only questionably living.

“I know, I know,” she says, face drawn up into an empathetic wince. “I know.” A long thumbnail collects his tears, and he knows that she does not, and never will, know. 

\---

A ghost, Jade floats down the stairs and out into the smoky evening to start his car and drive to the charnel house. A haze makes the hills seem sticky, faded around the edges like a flashback to an unsavory memory in a movie. He blinks, and nothing becomes clear. He holds up a hand in front of him, to make sure that his flesh has not become translucent. It does not matter. 

Rolling into the driveway, he finds Davey sitting on the step outside in sweatpants and an oversize Placebo shirt, flickering unreal with a travel mug of too-brewed green tea Jade can smell the second he steps out, tennis shoes crushing summer dry palm frond debris. 

Davey looks up with his hollow eyes, and the ghost that Jade is feels mortal, for a moment. But then he remembers Davey’s sad, dry voice saying _It’s about death. And realizing we should have died when we had the chance_ , and knows that their opportunity to die passed long ago, back when they were still young and beautiful and vain and naive enough to think that they still had years to burn. 

“Sorry it’s so late,” Davey tells him. He sets his tea down. 

Jade shakes his head. “No. It’s not. It’s fine. I’m having trouble acclimating back to the real world anyway, after writing,” he explains, rubbing his face and sitting down gingerly next to Davey on the step. The driveway badly needs to be swept, blown free of all the organic decay clogging its airways. Hot, ashy night rattles through, and Davey flinches away when Jade leans closer. 

“The real world,” Davey sighs, looking down over the glittering expanse of city sprawling beneath them in a whir of red and white points of light, dusty through the ash. “What, responsibilities? Laundry? Gardening? Feeding the dog?” 

Jade shrugs. “Something like that.” 

Davey shakes his head. “I don’t have that. There is no real world for me, only this.” 

Jade knows. He knows with a deep, years-old ache of misery because this is exactly why he could not stay here, consumed and dying. Suffocated under the weight of always burning down, rather then staying safe in ease and Eden while the world smoldered to dust around him, instead. He could not stay here because there is no distinction for Davey. Art is life an life is art. There is no real world. 

He cards a hand through his hair, watches eddies of ash rise and fall like the tide. “I need the real world, Dave.” 

Davey just nods, swallows around a thick throat. Jade lets his eyes slide eastward for a moment, falling on Davey’s black eyes, full to the brim, the shadows under them like cement dragging a body to the seafloor. He feels like he’s been here before. 

“This is all we do,” Jade says quietly, hand creeping along the step towards Davey only to stop inches before touching the small of his back. “Have this same talk over and over again. Realize we’re different in the same ways over and over again. You think at least one of us would try something different by now.” 

Shaking his head, Davey says, “I don’t think we can anymore. I think we’re doomed to repeat ourselves. I know I am.” 

Jade knows he is too, but stays silent, rubbing his knuckles. He knows because he tried to break from the cycle of forever rewind, he tried to rewrite his future, his meaning. He tried to run from Davey. But here he is, sitting beside him looking out onto a burning city, hand convulsing with the compulsion to touch him. They are stuck on repeat, winding more and more tightly each rotation, until their faces blend into the same reflection. 

“You know,” Davey says, voice muffled from his palms, “I used to reuse themes intentionally. I used to self-reference because I meant to. It was a part of what I was doing. But now, I can’t stop. It’s like I’ve lost the ability to use other language to say what I mean. I can _only_ repeat, I can _only_ self-reference. There’s nothing new, and no new way to say it.” 

“I noticed,” Jade says. 

“It’s terrifying,” Davey admits, inhaling around a ghost of panic. And Jade didn’t mean to, but he’s touching Davey. His hand is pushing under the white of his shirt, covering tattoos he’s been able to see through the fabric, even in the night. Davey starts, flinches away from him, shatters into gooseflesh but Jade holds on, gripping handfuls of him desperately, holding onto his mirror so that he can exist.

“Come here,” he says stupidly, pulling Davey’s resisting body to his chest. “Just--”

“Jade,” Davey says, meaningless. The word he repeats most, the word he will be stuck repeating until Armageddon. It becomes stretched, reedy, frail. “Jade, I--”

“I know,” Jade says. “I know, but, just--”

“Okay,” Davey says more to himself than Jade, eyes shut tight and color on his cheeks as he makes fists in Jade’s jacket. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m okay.” He takes breaths so deep they break the air around them. 

_And I am the one who ran_ , Jade thinks, desperate, tasting the oil in Davey’s hair, face scrubbed raw by the stubble on the sides of his skull, fingers counting ribs, shaping scapulae. _I am the one who’s running._

Davey’s breath is coming fast and hazardous, and Jade tries to slow it with his hands, his mouth. He thinks Davey won’t kiss him back, that maybe after years of this he’s perfected the art of self-preservation, but he’s wrong. Davey is right there with him, clutching at him like he is the buoy in a storm, teeth in his lips. Stupid, suicidal. 

The smell of Davey crying is so familiar Jade could use it as a compass to navigate nearly every moment of his past. The wet, salty heat of it, the way it smells like sickness, like sore silent throats and awe at the hands of beauty, like restored faith in love, like the repeated, endless destruction of that faith. His breath staggers around the smell, and he licks up Davey’s rough cheek, tasting the whole of his history. 

He remembers when they first fell in love, they would lie twined in Davey’s single mattress on the floor, planes and crevices pressed together quietly, perfectly. They’d lie and touch one another and breathe in silence, and suddenly, Jade would realize his neck was wet and sticky where Davey’s face was pressed. He’d panic, terrified that Davey had been crying and he had only just noticed it. 

And back then, is was usually just tears from being moved. From having his world reshaped around the presence of love. But it didn’t matter why he was crying, only that Jade wanted to know the second it began, so that he could begin himself. Begin the swallowing, or the drowning, or whatever it might require. He wanted to be there, he wanted to _know_. 

It took months, years before he could recognize the signs of its slow, subtle arrival. The altered pattern of Davey’s breaths, the approaching humidity, the seismic tremors of his ribcage. And later, the smell. 

Now he can smell Davey’s tears from miles away. He is haunted by the scent. He doesn’t understand how there was ever a time when he wasn’t immediately changed by the silence of Davey’s sobs. He could run and run and run until he was on the opposite end of the earth as Davey and he would still smell it. 

Their mouths and chins are wet and slicked and thick with it. Jade opens his palms on either side of Davey’s face, he pushes the tears into Davey’s hair, down his neck. He kicks over the travel mug of tea and does not pause to catch it before it rolls down the driveway and off the cliff into the city. He licks the roof of his mouth, pushes him down onto his back on the step so his white shirt will be dusty and ashy hours from now and Davey will hate himself for letting it get that way under the weight of Jade’s body, the weight of his betrayal. Davey will regret it, and Jade wishes amid their kisses that he could save Davey’s shirt from evidence of this slip. That he could protect all of Davey’s memory from every one of their slips, erase all the ash and smudging and filth from the last decade. 

Instead he can only stain. There is no way to stop this. He is undead and repeating, invisible and without a reflection unless he is here, anchored to the cement at the bottom of the sea while the city begins and ends its annual burn. The album repeats. Davey shudders and repeats. Jade runs and repeats. Tries to escape but he ends up where he started, the earth one great loop, every road leading back to the same highway he originally crashed and totaled upon, a smoldering heap of ash where they pray to die, but are forever denied reprieve. The further Jade goes, the more he disappears, and inevitably he will be drawn back here. Realized and solid beneath Davey’s bleeding palms. 

_What am I doing? Why am I doing this?_ Jade’s mind begs of his body, as it covers and crushes and reshapes Davey.

 _Because you have to_ the absence formerly occupied by his reflection answers. Then repeats, _because you must._


End file.
